


and we did not walk away unscathed

by aletterinthenameofsanity



Series: long and happy was their reign [2]
Category: Chronicles of Narnia (Movies), Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual Character, Character Study, Coming of Age, Multi, Polyamory, The Problem of Susan, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-03
Updated: 2017-11-03
Packaged: 2019-01-28 23:57:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12618480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aletterinthenameofsanity/pseuds/aletterinthenameofsanity
Summary: In this world, her family does not go out with a bang. It disappears, little by little, escaping back to the kingdom she once called home.Her world does not end. It just goes on.-She takes her war from the battlefield to the courtroom. She graduates law school, carefully clawing her way through every two-bit lawyer in her way. She knows how to negotiate, how to ply the response she wants out of people. She has two decades of experience over these other law students.Susan was known as the Marksman Queen. Is sinking her sights into humans at the defense table, aiming her words at those who claim falsehood all that different?She goes partying one night, dressed up in her best nylons with lipstick painted across her mouth. She is a force of nature, a Queen of this seedy college bar.This is not about vanity. This is about holding onto what she has left in this world, about building a Kingdom when a god cast her out of Paradise. This is about the power a dethroned Queen can hold in an imperfect world, the power Cupid can hold after she has lost her bow.Susan's family stays in Narnia to be better. She stays in England to make this world better.





	and we did not walk away unscathed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dirgewithoutmusic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/gifts).



_Your sadness will bury you alive, and you are the only one who can shovel your way out with hardened hands and ragged fingernails, bleeding your despair into the unforgiving earth._

_Darling, you see, no heroes are coming for you. Grab your sword, and don your own armor._

**― Emily Palermo**

 

In another world, Susan Pevensie is the Queen who gets her entire family stolen in a single day.

Her family dies, taken by a train crash.

As quick as a gunshot, they are gone. She has to identify the bodies, is forced to look at the twisted corpses of her siblings and family.

Out with a bang, as they say.

-

In this world, her family does not go out with a bang. It disappears, little by little, escaping back to the kingdom she once called home.

Her world does not end. It just goes on.

-

First Edmund doesn’t return.

Edmund had always needed Narnia far more than the rest of them. She could see it weighing on him for five years after they returned, watched him crumble and die inside. Edmund was a King in Narnia, a great diplomat. She watched proudly as he found himself in a way he never could have in Britain.

Then they return, and Edmund turns to a little lost boy. He doesn’t know how to live in a world like this one, one where he is nothing better or greater than a schoolboy.  He always bore the weight of responsibility well, but in this world he seems to be crushed. 

Edmund Pevensie was never meant for this world, never meant to go out like a lamppost on the edge of a wintry forest. He was never meant to tumble back into a world that beat him down, that tried to feed poison into his brain about his desire in lovers.

Narnia let him find the strength he always had, let him carve diplomacy and tact out of sharp wit and a desire for redemption. It gave him demons, pushed living nightmares into his face and refused to let them leave him.

Narnia haunts him when they return to England. This is obvious. From the nightmares to the too-old look in his eyes, Edmund Pevensie is not meant to live in England any longer.

Right before they returned to Narnia, she watched something break in him. He charged into a fight- charged into battle, more like- that Peter had recklessly gotten himself into and went down swinging. Edmund couldn't stop anymore. He couldn't  _not_ be the King, the protector that he became over two decades in Narnia. This world pains him in a way that she recognizes. He chafes under the very air here, yearning for Narnia in every movement.

When he turns back at the tree, she is the only one of the siblings who isn’t the least bit surprised.

-

When she first becomes Queen, Susan is used to being underestimated. She is an archer, not a swordswoman; she is a woman, not a man. She uses this to her advantage.

When Susan arrives in Narnia for the second time, she pays attention. She listens to the whispers in Aslan’s How, the legends that have sprung up around her and her siblings. Tales of the Golden Age carry similar themes and characters: Peter, the Great Commander, Lucy, the Great Healer, and Edmund, the Great Diplomat. The tales surrounding her own name are harder to untangle. Was she Susan, the Great Neutralizer, who ordered hits on the worst of men? Was she Susan, the Great Lover, who suaded lover after lover into her bed? Was she Susan, the Great Spy, who crept like a mouse and sprang like a rabbit when least expected?

No one seems to know the answer.

(Susan might like to say that she is none of the above. She is the Queen of a forgotten kingdom, of a time long dead and gone. This is not her Narnia. This is Caspian’s and now Edmund's. She is Queen of Narnia no longer.)

-

She doesn’t hear from Lucy or Eustace and she realizes what must have happened to them.

-

She goes partying that night, dressed up in her best nylons with lipstick painted across her mouth. She is a force of nature, a Queen of this seedy college bar.

This is not about vanity. This is about holding onto what she has left in this world, about building a Kingdom when a god cast her out of Paradise. This is about the power a dethroned Queen can hold in an imperfect world, the power Cupid can hold after she has lost her bow.

Aslan cannot deny her power in this world like he did on each of her final days in Narnia. He cannot rip her power from her painted nails like he did to her calloused hands.

-

Peter is the last, his fiancee Dr. Anna-Mae Brown disappearing at his side. They never make it off the train and to the Professor’s house.

 

The Professor calls her. “Your brother’s in Narnia.”

“Aslan said we wouldn’t return,” she says, not indignantly but a quiet statement of fact.

“Looks like he decided otherwise.”

She lets out a long-suffering sigh. “He always does that.”

 

She knows that Peter always longed to return, no matter how much effort he made to adjusting back to England. She knows that he had accepted his fate, but to be back in Narnia must overjoy him. Anna-Mae will do well in Narnia as well. Susan knows of her “list of impossibilities,” of how she allows herself faith in impossibility.

Anna-Mae will make a great Queen Consort.

-

She sees them, sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, in the back of a mirror, in the dark corner of a smoke-filled room. She sees glittering balls where Anna-Mae dances with Peter, both clad in Narnian fashion. She sees her younger brother bearing the High King’s crown, Caspian in a throne at his side. She sees Eustace, bearing the emblem of a dragon as he fights the Northern Giants. She sees Lucy, sweet little Lucy, becoming a Narnian doctor and saving people with Anna-Mae.

She sees this, and she is proud of them.

(This does not mean she wants to go back, however.)

-

She swipes lipstick on her mouth, pictures Lucy’s response. “We never wore lipstick in Narnia, Susan,” she’d say.

Susan survived three wars, countless negotiations, the loss of a young prince, the betrayals of lovers and brothers, and the disappearance of all her family members. She has survived assassination attempts and age regression and a near-fatal bout of cholera.

She can allow herself lipstick. She can allow herself to let strength grow where it could not be found, allow soft skin to be where callouses were the norm. She can allow herself rouge and nylons, lipsticks and hair curlers. There is nothing wrong with beauty, with feeling good in herself.

-

She falls in love twice over. Once with a freckle-faced Jewish boy with ink-stained hands and a wonderful mouth, and once with a dark-skinned girl who wears knee-length skirts and waves protest signs. The three of them fall into bed together and then carve themselves a home in Finchley, where her and her siblings used to live.

Claudia and Abraham become her best friends, her lovers, her pillars. They are perfectly ordinary people (sure, they have a few quirks, but everyone does). Abraham's at school to be a teacher; Claudia studies politics and wants to MP for Labour someday.

She loves them, and they love her.

-

She takes her war from the battlefield to the courtroom. She graduates law school, carefully clawing her way through every two-bit lawyer in her way. She knows how to negotiate, how to ply the response she wants out of people. She has two decades of experience over these other law students.

Susan was known as the Marksman Queen. Is sinking her sights into humans at the defense table, aiming her words at those who claim falsehood all that different?

She sees what needs to be done, and she does it. She uses the skills she has to get what she can done, and then ropes other people in to help. She recognizes her weaknesses. Even back in Narnia it had always been this way.

She rises from the defense table, makeup perfectly applied, hair perfectly curled, and destroys every lying witness that she examines. These are her new weapons of war, her armor against expectation. If her opponents underestimate her because of the way she likes to dress, then all the more power.

Susan sometimes wonders on the nature of battle, if war is something that runs in the blood. She wonders if she carried it back from Narnia, or if maybe it was something that always existed in her. 

Susan Pevensie was never a cowering mouse. Susan Pevensie was a gentle lion. Gentleness does not mean folding when a fight comes. It means comforting people after losses, about taking care of those you love. If taking care of them means fighting viciously to protect them, then so be it.

Susan the Gentle knows how to fight.

-

She tells stories to the little children Abraham teaches. She tells fairytales about four siblings who became Kings and Queens. She tells them about a lion who could not always be trusted, about how one by one each of the Kings and Queens had to leave and go on a journey to return.

(She never tells them about how the final Queen never returned.)

-

Susan Pevensie does not lose faith.

Her family slips away into Paradise, and she stays behind on earth. There is a strength in this, in finding magic in world where perfection is denied to you.

Her younger brother becomes the High King he was always meant to be. Lucy becomes one of the greatest healing forces Narnia has ever known. Peter and Anna-Mae marry and become chief advisors to the Kings of Narnia.

Susan fights for the underdog, for every falsely accused victim of the bureaucracy, of the faulty system, of racism and sexism and a whole host of other things. She fights for Abraham Miller and Claudia Thomas, for everyone she’s fallen in love with and everyone who’s left her. 

She makes weapons out of words, makes armor out of lipstick. She uses her power for good in a world that needs change.

She has never been good. She was once great, but that was something that left her limbs a long time ago. Now she powers through, trying to make as big of a difference that she can. She memorizes every victory, every _not guilty_ she wins. The smallest of cases make her feel as proud as she did when she won battles back in Narnia.

-

Susan is the only one that stays, and she is okay with this. She did not need Narnia- Narnia needed her. Now England needs her.

Her family stays in Narnia to be better. She stays in England to make this _world_ better.

-

It’s the 1970s, and she’s been with Abraham and Claudia for twenty years. Abraham is a schoolteacher, Claudia an assistant to their local Labour MP, and Susan still as quick of a lawyer as she was twenty years ago.

Power doesn’t need to be carried in a sword, a crown, a bow.

It is flour on Abraham’s button-down, eggs on Claudia’s glasses, a smear of butter on Susan’s cheek. It is laughter and burnt biscuits and milk-soaked kisses. It is dancing to the record-player, bare feet skipping over white tiles as the Rolling Stones plays.

Claudia sings along, Abraham laughs, and Susan smiles.

-

Her family becomes legend in Narnia, Caspian and Eustace and Anna-Mae's names joining those of the Pevensies in Narnian lore. Her name become lesser, almost forgotten. History names her the Queen who Doubted, the Queen who Left.

Susan Pevensie lives, and her life is normal, and she is happy.

This is enough. This will  _always_ be enough.


End file.
